Chiara Ferrin

Asphalt, Dubai

ChiaraFerrin.com

HABITAT

Isolation due to the quarantine led me to examine the landscape and the repercussions of human activity on it, using Google Earth.

An instrument almost unknown to me suddenly turned out to be inspiring. The time has passed for searching for beauty. It’s time to look at reality and avoid looking elsewhere. It’s time to look the landscape issue in the eye and avoid rejecting it by chasing to the myth of the lyrical landscape. The landscape is spoiled, distorted and deformed. It’s imperative to have full awareness for the damages which our way of living keeps on producing in the whole planet.

These homemade collages, compositions of photographs drawn from Google Earth, create patterns which can alter reality and confuse the vision. The esthetic dignity, however, hides that which humans still struggle to recognize as an epochal disaster.

— Chiara Ferrin, Modena, Italy

Ceramic District of Sassuolo, Italy
Petrochemical Storage, Houston, USA
Avocado Plantations, Chile
Palm Oil Cultivation, Malaysia

Olivier Longre

OlivierLongre.net

Paradoxically, what interests me most in photography is not the immediacy of the shot but the duration: a temporality made up of suspended moments, waiting and absence in a world in balance, a world of “almost nothing” where the presence of man is only suggested. This contradiction serves as a motor for me: before the natural observation of things, awareness of fleeting time and the desire to grasp it amalgamate.

More formally, the search for this same balance between opposing forces is found in the objects and structures photographed: play between full and empty, dialogue between the animate and the inanimate, fusion of the masculine and the feminine.

This series, titled Interstices, shows us how natural and modern elements coexist and interact. The architecture of structures and the architecture of nature seem to be animated by one and the same energy. All of these photographs were taken in France and Spain in 2019.

— Olivier Longre, Lyon, France